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ABSTRACT:
BOOK REVIEWED:
José Saramago, A VIAGEM DO ELEFANTE - Lisbon: Caminho, 2008
EXTRACT:
In this brief piece, I offer the reader a few reflections on "A Viagem do Elefante" José Saramago's novel published in 2008. At the time of publication, the author told the world it might be his last novel. In fact, as we know, he has already followed it in 2009 with a new novel, "Caim". Nonetheless, I believe "A Viagem do Elefante" does have a certain valedictory feel to it: even if no longer chronologically Saramago's last work, In its warmth, geniality and good humour, as well as its joyful exploration of the resources of the Portuguese language, it conveys a sensation of farewell to literature that might recall Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Like that play - also chronologically not quite Shakespeare's last work, but the one in which we find him bidding adieu to the stage ("our revels now are ended") - Saramago's mature and mellow novel is, ultimately, a comedy in which threats never quite come to fruition and no-one dies untowardly.
Saramago recounts what is in itself a true story, the journey of an Indian elephant and his retinue across land and sea, plain and mountain, all the way from Lisbon to Vienna. It was in 1551 that King João III of Portugal gifted an Indian elephant to his cousin the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son-in-law of the Emperor Charles V. Saramago thus returns to the genre of the historical novel in which he wrote so memorably in "Memorial do Convento". That novel, set in the eighteenth century, focused on the Portugal of the Inquisition, though not excluding the wider European world, in, for instance, the figure of Domenico Scarlatti. The new novel starts in Portugal but fans out through Spain and Italy to its Austrian finishing-point: more pan-European, it also takes in another wider world, that of empire. The book's twin heroes are, beyond all doubt, the elephant Solomon (Salomão or Solimão) and his mahout or keeper (in Portuguese, "cornaca"), Subhro (later absurdly renamed Fritz), a Bengali Indian and nominal Christian convert, arrived in Portugal via Goa (...)
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